Mama's food...

On the farm my mother made bread every other day on a charcoal burner and a terracotta platter.
She sat on a tiny stool, surrounded by all she needed. The dough balls covered with a cloth inside a large wooden bowl, caraway, sesame and poppy seeds and a jar of virgin olive oil.
As a young boy, I watched her prepare the bread and other dishes with great interest, always helping her shell peas, take the leaves off artichokes, peel potatoes, pick herbs, etc...

My favourite late morning snack, after helping my mother prepare food for seven people, was a fresh, juicy tomato sprinkled with salt and pepper and a chunk of warm bread dripping with butter churned by our own milkman.

She cooked Algerian tagines, French stews, Italian pastas or Spanish paellas, rarely remarking that many of them were some or other country’s national dish. For her it was just food, pure and simple.
She prepared our meals faithfully following recipes passed on from mother to daughter since the beginning of time.
As a family, we rarely ate out. My parents sometimes invited other relatives and friends for family meals. The hospitality was always returned within days.

Whenever my mother cooked a new dish, she often sent me over to a neighbour or an aunt with a small sample of her latest creation. The gesture was always reciprocated. In fact I was never let go without taking back a few spoonfuls of food in the hurriedly washed and dried dish.

Cooking took up all my mother's mornings. Well, that was before Papa brought her a brand new pressure cooker after we had moved to the town and the place came with a gas cooker.
From then on, my mother was a liberated woman. She had finally discovered Fast Food, long before I did. Under pressure, most dishes took less than half an hour to cook.

She ended up with so much time on her hands that she began doing volunteering work. Within weeks, she became the first female president of our town’s Red Crescent branch.

During my student days, while trying to recreate her delicious dishes, I often rang her all the way from England when I could not remember certain ingredients. The phone call regularly cost more than the food itself.



I took the photos below in Spain.
My favourite is the bottom one. Those cakes were just one delicious mouthful each. Mmmmmmmmmmmmm.....























Back in July I loved Marrakesh so much that we're off there for a few days...


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